One of the differences in how people analyze the world I’ve found most interesting has been called high decoupling vs low decoupling. What is decoupling? In this context, it means an ability to consider ideas in isolation, disconnecting them from other variables and influences. Low decouplers think of ideas as embedded in a social context, and thus think analyzing ideas in abstract, isolated terms rather than placing those ideas in a social narrative is misguided. A very long essay you can check out describing this divide and applying it to modern debates can be found here, but here are some snippets outlining some of the key ideas:
High-decouplers isolate ideas from each other and the surrounding context. This is a necessary practice in science which works by isolating variables, teasing out causality and formalizing and operationalizing claims into carefully delineated hypotheses. Cognitive decoupling is what scientists do…
While science and engineering disciplines (and analytic philosophy) are populated by people with a knack for decoupling who learn to take this norm for granted, other intellectual disciplines are not. Instead they’re largely composed of what’s opposite the scientist in the gallery of brainy archetypes: the literary or artistic intellectual.
This crowd doesn’t live in a world where decoupling is standard practice. On the contrary, coupling is what makes what they do work. Novelists, poets, artists and other storytellers like journalists, politicians and PR people rely on thick, rich and ambiguous meanings, associations, implications and allusions to evoke feelings, impressions and ideas in their audience. The words “artistic” and “literary” refers to using idea couplings well to subtly and indirectly push the audience’s meaning-buttons.
To a low-decoupler, high-decouplers’ ability to fence off any threatening implications looks like a lack of empathy for those threatened, while to a high-decoupler the low-decouplers insistence that this isn’t possible looks like naked bias and an inability to think straight.
I tend to lean much more into the high-decoupler mindset. One aspect of high-decoupling I find beneficial is the ability to separate things that are often practically related but still logically distinct. As the author of the above-linked essay notes, “Even when issues don’t belong together logically and/or causally they’re often structurally, socially and emotionally similar and that makes them feel like a single thing — with a single positive or negative valence that ‘informs’ our reactions to single instances.” But even if different things emotionally feel the same, nonetheless, different things are different. (That’s right, I’m not afraid to make such bold, controversial statements as “different things are different.” Stay tuned for further hot takes!) And I find it very useful and clarifying to separate these things when trying to think about the world.
As one example, Dan Moller, in his book Governing Least, decouples the ideas of desert (not the sandy kind, the philosophical kind of “desert” that indicates deservingness) from entitlement. In ordinary, day-to-day life, what you deserve and what you are entitled to tend to go together frequently enough that it “makes them feel like a single thing – with a single positive or negative valence that ‘informs’ our reaction to single instances.” Thus, many philosophers who advocate redistribution argue that the well-off lack desert for what they’ve accumulated, even if they accumulated their wealth in the most morally pristine ways possible. If you accumulated your wealth honestly because you were intelligent, hard working, and driven – well, they say, you didn’t deserve to be born an intelligent and hard-working person. You didn’t earn your natural capacities, nor did you earn the environment you grew up in and the mentors you encountered to help you develop those capacities. Thus, you don’t deserve the wealth you accumulate through those capacities.
Moller, however, points out that what one deserves is logically distinct from what they are entitled to. If you and I are hiking together and you just so happen to stumble across a massive diamond valued at a hundred thousand dollars, clearly you didn’t deserve this good fortune in some deep moral sense. Nonetheless, you entitled to it. Similarly, someone who wins the lottery or hits a jackpot on a slot machine doesn’t deserve their winnings, but they are still entitled to them. The fact that you didn’t “deserve” to find the diamond does no work at all for the case for redistribution. If I were to say to you “You didn’t deserve to find that diamond and it could just as easily have been me, so give me some of that money, it’s mine!” I’d be in the wrong. It simply doesn’t follow that because you didn’t deserve your good fortune that I therefore am deserving of it – or even that I’m entitled to take some of it from you.
There are also discrepancies in the opposite direction – sometimes, you can deserve something yet not be entitled to it. Let’s say you’re an employee in my company. You work hard and produce great value, and a job opening is available that represents a significant promotion for you and for which you are clearly qualified. Nonetheless, because it’s my company, I decide to give the job to an old buddy of mind who has done none of the work you’ve done. Since this is my company, I can hire whomever I want into whatever role I want – you are not entitled to that job. However, it still seems reasonable to say that even though you were not entitled to that promotion, you still deserved it.
Or suppose you are getting married and want your parents to come to your wedding, but they refuse. Perhaps you’re marrying someone of a different race and they disapprove, or maybe you’re gay and marrying someone of the same sex and they deeply oppose that. I think it’s fair to say that you deserve to have your parents there supporting you at your wedding, but nonetheless, you are still not entitled to it. Their refusal to be there and support you is wrong, but it would also be wrong to force their attendance and make them pretend to be supportive against their will. Thus, while desert and entitlement often (perhaps usually) overlap, they are still distinct and can be decoupled. You can deserve something but not be entitled to it, and you can be entitled to something even if you don’t deserve it.
At the risk of taxing your patience, dear reader, all of the above has simply been me laying the ground for another decoupling I think is worth making – being responsible for your situation, and deserving your situation. If you are responsible for the situation you are in, does that equate to saying you deserve to be in that situation?
This has some intuitive force behind it. If you tell someone “You’re responsible for the situation you’re in,” that seems almost synonymous with saying “this is your fault” or “you deserved it.” Unless, of course, the situation is good, in which case saying they’re responsible for being there sounds like a form of affirmation or congratulations. “What you are responsible for” and “what you deserve” also seem “like a single thing” at first glance. But reality is rarely able to be described in a single exceptionless statement, and these, too, can be decoupled.
Picture the following situation. John Q. Example is wandering down the street, listening to music with his headphones on. Unfortunately for Mr. Example, he’s so engrossed in the jaunty tunes coming through his headphones that he loses all focus on where he is wandering – and he wanders into a crosswalk, where he is struck and killed by a car. It seems to me in this case, two things can be said. Mr. Example is responsible for what happened – his behavior was careless and directly lead to his death. At the same time, it also seems true to me that Mr. Example did not deserve to die. He was responsible for causing his own death, but he nonetheless did not deserve death. After all, imagine that he had absentmindedly wandered through the intersection but, through sheer luck, was missed by every car that drove past, making it safely to the other side. Suppose after witnessing this, I pull out my trusty handgun and shoot him dead. When the police are called, I try explaining to them that was I did was justified, because, after all, Mr. Example deserved to die because of his inattentive and careless behavior. That would obviously be an absurd statement, and I’d be a moral monster for making it.
My aim here is not to provide some finely-tuned description for when being responsible means deserving it, and when it doesn’t. (Good luck trying to spell that out!) But I do think people’s difficulty decoupling the two ideas leads to problems.
Someone who holds the “you’re responsible for X therefore you deserve X” principle very strongly is Bryan Caplan. For years he’s been referencing a book he’s been writing on poverty and blame (a book I’m impatiently awaiting!), and one key distinction he makes is between the deserving and undeserving poor. Part of what makes someone deserving or undeserving depends on how responsible they are for their situation, as Caplan argues here:
A person deserves his problem if there are reasonable steps the he could have taken to avoid the problem. Poverty is a problem, so a person deserves his poverty if there are reasonable steps he could have taken to avoid his poverty.
Caplan, of course, does not argue that everyone who is poor deserves it. By his lights, many people who are poor don’t deserve it, such as those born disabled, children of irresponsible parents, or people who had the bad luck to be born in impoverished countries and who are prevented from attaining better prospects elsewhere. Nonetheless, he says, there are many people who are poor today who are responsible for the situation they are in, and thus they deserve to be poor.
Now, I don’t find the above quoted statement from Caplan very compelling as stated. The aforementioned John Q. Example could have taken “reasonable steps” to prevent his death, but it still seems obvious to me that he didn’t deserve to die. And while Mr. Example is a hypothetical case, it’s not a far-fetched or fanciful one. Scenarios basically matching what I described are not at all rare. While “you are responsible for X therefore you deserve X” is often true, perhaps even true in most cases, it is not a logically or metaphysically necessary truth. More is needed to establish that one deserves X than merely pointing out that they are responsible for X. I’m hoping he spells out additional arguments to bridge this gap in his book, when it is released.
But there’s another side to this coin. Because some ideas, if not decoupled, seem “like a single thing” with “a single positive or negative valence that ‘informs’ our reactions to single instances,” many people will respond to Caplan’s argument in a particularly counterproductive way. Suppose you don’t believe anyone ever truly “deserves” to live a life of poverty. This is surely a valence many people will have. When hearing the argument “they are responsible for their poverty, therefore they deserve it,” some people, failing to decouple responsibility from desert, will play the reverse card and instead think “they don’t deserve poverty, therefore, they are not responsible for it.” To such people, I would encourage taking a third route – “they don’t deserve to be in poverty, but they are still responsible for it.”
Why would I encourage this route? For one, I think as a factual matter Caplan is correct that very often people are responsible for their poverty through the choices they have made over their life. (In the past, I have been such a person myself.) And here’s another one of those hot takes I promised – I think we should say things that are true and refrain from saying things that are false. Even if you believe someone who has made those decisions doesn’t deserve to be poor, it would still be untrue to say they are not responsible for having ended up poor. And for two, if you truly have compassion for people in that circumstance, the absolute worst thing you can do for them is convince them that they aren’t responsible for how they ended up. If someone becomes genuinely convinced their choices aren’t what created their current situation, that entails convincing them there is nothing they could do to improve their situation by making different choices. Convincing someone they bear no responsibility for their situation isn’t compassion. It’s denying their basic agency and denying them even a modicum of dignity.
READER COMMENTS
David Henderson
Oct 11 2024 at 12:48pm
This has really got me thinking.
Thanks, Kevin.
Andrew M
Oct 11 2024 at 2:20pm
Moller’s book is very good, but he was not the first, of course, to distinguish entitlement from desert. Nozick did so in 1974, and the point is often made, and forcefully, in the writings of Antony Flew and of Jan Narveson. It deserves to be better known.
Henri Hein
Oct 11 2024 at 3:15pm
I thought that sounded familiar. I must have seen it in Anarchy, State and Utopia.
Henri Hein
Oct 11 2024 at 3:13pm
Good stuff. A few years ago Will Smith made a powerful little monologue that went viral, on the difference between fault and responsibility.
Peter
Oct 11 2024 at 3:44pm
You had me up until the last two paragraphs; it was a good read and a something worth chewing on up until then though. The problem I have with your conclusion though is it makes the word “responsible” become meaningless like when pedantic philosophers use the word “selfishness”, both become a synonym for “has moral agency” hence for all intents and purposes, meaningless as a word when trying to have a conversation with normal people using normal usage. For moral culpability, which is what “responsible” is trying to communicate, the caveat has to be “based on the information actually known and believed by the person at the point in time” rather than assume, as people do (and you imply as well) perfect information or, in legal terms, “a person should have known”. To use John Q.’s example it’s ludicrous to claim he was responsible for getting hit by the car because he got out of bed that morning or didn’t commit suicide the day before simply because “he made a decisions which inadvertently led to a future outcome”. I mean you can stretch that to it was his actually his parents responsibility that he was hit by a car because they made a decision to not abort him or it was the headphone manufactures responsibilities because they made a decision to manufacture headphones.
I used to work as a case manager in a homeless shelter and unfortunately have pretty extensive recent experience with the criminal manufacturing system and the thing is thinking like what you are pushing in the end is why we have so many people in prison today, we have lost the concept of mens rea in practice (regardless of what is on paper), i.e. “you aren’t insane so the fact you intentionally did something means you are prima facie guilty”. I mean I could sit and pontificate, as many of my peers did on their high horse, to a twenty-three year old homeless girl that really likes meth that getting pregnant for the sixth time with her sixth pimp in six years is her fault because she won’t refrain from doing any number of behaviors which statistically make her worse off and if only she would be responsible and change then rainbows and unicorns would appear but the thing is they won’t and she is being responsible in her immediate circumstances.
Likewise if a person is sitting in jail on a probation violation because the judge told him to defer to the probation officer on the exact implementation of a term of probation whom then promptly on record tells the person to do something contrary to exact text of that term of probation and then is arrest for breaking his terms of probation (or not deferring to the probation officer on the flipside) they aren’t responsibly for being in jail even if they aren’t insane. I mean sure he is “responsible” as in he did what a reasonable rational person would do and follow what the judge directed but if you want to claim he is in jail as a result of his choice, the word responsible become meaningless. And no that isn’t to say “well he’s not deserving of jail but he did make a choice hence responsible hence the disentanglement point”, his decision at the point in time he made it was responsible “I did what the judge said”.
A person is responsible if they had intent of the resultant outcome, not otherwise.
Jim Glass
Oct 11 2024 at 11:03pm
People are responsible for reasonably foreseeable outcomes of their actions, whether intended or not.
The classic law school example is the person who throws a bomb into a public crowd as a political protest. Innocent people are killed and maimed by the explosion, resulting stampede, etc. But the bomb-thrower says entirely truthfully that he didn’t intend to hurt anybody, merely to attract attention to a cause … And we have the all too common real life example of the otherwise model citizen who one night loads up on drinks in a public house before driving home: “I didn’t intend to kill those pedestrians”. Etc., etc.
And this doesn’t even consider the ease with which people excuse their own malignant behaviors to themselves by telling themselves they have only good intentions. We just discussed “The road through all 12 Circles of Hell is paved with good intentions” in another comment thread.
David Seltzer
Oct 12 2024 at 6:34pm
Jim wrote; “I didn’t intend to kill those pedestrians”. Etc., etc. Good point! While he didn’t intend to kill those pedestrians, there was foreseeability. To wit. Foreseeability is a personal injury law concept used to determine proximate cause after an accident. The foreseeability test basically asks whether the person causing the injury should have reasonably expected the consequences that would result because of their conduct.
steve
Oct 11 2024 at 7:59pm
I dont think there is really much disagreement about the concepts that some people are responsible for their poverty (or success) and so they deserve it. I think most of our disagreements are about the degrees of responsibility and desert, how we determine them, and then what, if anything, we should do about it.
Say Kid A has well to do, supportive parents. Goes to best schools, tutors, international travel, professional help writing application essay. GPA is 4.0 and SATs are 780s. Kid B has poor parents, not supportive, goes to mediocre school, has to work 25 hours a week to help support family. GPA 3.9, SATS 760s. Both kids worked hard at their schooling. How do you decide what each kid is responsible for and what they deserve if both want to go to the same highly selective school?
Steve
Jim Glass
Oct 12 2024 at 12:51am
It’s important to distinguish “rational explanation” from moralistically judgmental “just deserts”, especially when dealing with social groups.
At the turn of the 20th Century, when poor immigrants were flooding into NYC through Ellis Island, children from poor Jewish families had by far the highest school graduation rate in the city — higher than the children of the rich “ruling” native white Protestant class. Meanwhile, children from Irish and Italian families had a near 0% graduation rate. The reason for this was that the Irish and Italians had come from regions where they deeply distrusted the government (and government schools) and brought this attitude with them, while the Jewish families had a culture that highly valued education.
This of course had a big influence on their rate of assimilation. Within a generation a stunning number of those Jewish children became Nobel winners and famous intellectuals, and a disproportionate number of them had moved into the high-earning business and professional class. While the Irish and Italians worked their way up in society more slowly as manual laborers, small-time entrepreneurs and cops chasing mobsters.
Should we say that each group got its “just desserts”?
Jim Glass
Oct 12 2024 at 12:10am
Cognitive Behavioral Psychology (the most evidence-based kind, which best passes control-group tests) as a basic principle states a clear distinction between “fault”/”desert” and “responsibility”. Nobody is at fault for (to be “blamed” for, or “deserves”) being in any unhappy situation that the uncaring world, cruel fate, other malignant people, or their own past ill actions, may have inflicted upon them.
But everybody is responsible for they way they react, behave, now in any such situation to make it better or worse. The quality of such reactions and behavior can be improved by learning to constructively control one’s (often excuse-making, confused, angry, vengeful) emotions and thoughts (cognitive behavior), which is a skill that can be learned like any other. And for most of us, this likely will be much more valuable than learning how to play golf or build a ship in a bottle.
Warren Platts
Oct 12 2024 at 8:01am
Very interesting read, Kevin. But honestly, it is a fool’s errand to try and seek out a set of necessary and sufficient conditions to determine the truth of sentences of the form ‘Jones deserves that p’ or ‘Smith is responsible that q’ or ‘Brown is entitled that r’. And ordinary language analysis doesn’t do much better when it comes to policy. Suppose a mother forgoes an abortion and sacrifices her career as a result. Or a father refuses to leave the Rust Belt town where his offspring live and his ancestors are buried. Or someone quits his job to take care of his aging parents so they can stay at home instead of life without parole in a dingy nursing home. Or even someone who had a dream about how to make society a better place and plowed their entire life savings into their start-up business that goes under. They are all in poverty because they chose love over personal expediency. Yet they are all responsible for their poverty. They could have chosen abortions or putting the kid up for adoption or abandoning their family or leaving their aging parents to fate. Does it follow that they were stupid or immoral or irresponsible for choosing love instead of vainglorious pursuit of wealth?
john hare
Oct 12 2024 at 5:38pm
This post made me think of the truck that was stolen from me about 25 years ago. Police got it and impounded it as the thief was using it to steal from another neighborhood. Thief got away and they ended up calling me at 1:22 am to ask if I knew where my truck was. I said driveway before they told me that they had it.
I ended up paying the tow and impound fees so I could get my truck back and get to work. Many people told me I shouldn’t have had to pay those fees. Obviously the thief should have paid, but was unavailable. Where is the deserve/responsibility in that case? The police and tow company can’t work for charity as I see it. So how was I supposed to respond to those telling me how wrong it was?
Matthias
Oct 12 2024 at 10:40pm
One mark of progress and prosperity is when we can lower the amount of virtuous behaviour necessary to keep one out of poverty. (But without blunting incentives too much otherwise.)
A similar example from technology: it used to be that you needed to be half a genius to do any programming. Over time, the threshold of necessary competence has dropped and dropped. Nowadays it’s easier than ever. (I might bring up recent advances in AI assistance for coding. But honestly the humble spreadsheet was the real killer example here.)
Similar in a place like Singapore or Germany, if you can hold down almost any kind of job, almost no matter how menial, and refrain from gambling or drinking all your money away, you gonna turn out ok-ish.
Achieving the same kind of modest prosperity in a place like Turkey or South Africa requires a lot more hard work and avoiding of pitfalls.
(Or perhaps a better example for my argument: achieving the same kind of prosperity in 1820s Germany or Singapore.)
Monte
Oct 13 2024 at 10:50pm
There’s a lot to unravel here that goes beyond decoupling “desert” from “responsibility”, some of which has already been addressed by other commenters. Germane to this discussion, IMO, is the term “contextualizing”, used by the essay’s author to refine the concept of “low decoupling.”
Context is crucial to our understanding of the determinants of social outcomes. For instance, it can help explain disparities in socio-economic status among different racial groups. It is less important, however, when discussing the consequences (or “just deserts”) of poor choices made by individuals. Caplan’s argument resonates with me here. In the case of John Q. Example, stupidity has a price that always gets paid (Dan Simmons).
I agree wth Kevin’s point that the worst thing we can do is convince people that they bear no responsibility for how they end up. While I accept that there are extenuating circumstances (lack of opportunity, discrimination, racism, etc.) that sometimes warrant intervention, this kind of messaging, particularly from politicians, engenders a victimhood mentality that instills a sense of hopelessness and fosters resentment towards those we are told are privileged.
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